Is there not some saying about a snowball effect? I am not really sure how it goes but I can definitely tell you this is what my life has done the past few months. To be honest I have written this blog entry in my head approximately 45972 times but never really let it come out my fingertips because that would do something even the wondrous K8e was not prepared for. That would make my life real. And lets be honest who out there actually wants their life to get REAL?!?! dreams, fantasy, someone else's. All those things sound great to me. But as many of you know mainly being the 6 people who read this blog and the one girl I went to High School with who now resides up there where its realllllyyyyy cold but her smile and unfairly luscious hair bring out the sunshine; I am not a fan of real life. I have been actively running from it openly for the past 3.5 ish years. But foolish me should have known that crap always catches up with you.
Can you tell I am totally avoiding actually getting to any kind of point here? Cause I would NEVER do something like that. All right (seriously can you believe I am nervous about just typing something), so I am going to sit here and try and get so many things out into the real world. Because EVERYONE knows the real world exists totally in internet land.
Yeah yeah I am going. So I suppose ill just do what I do best and just get to my written diarrhea and see where it goes. I will do my best to try and focus just as much on the crapola in my life as the goodness. But lets face it, how much does it suck to only ever write about either the super good or the super bad? I usually try to write about the middle which therefore gives away the reason I SUCK AT BLOG WRITING. My life is never in the middle.
Well back in the fall I found this Graduate program in Paris that I absolutely fell in love with. It was tailor made perfect for me. So even with a "broken" leg I TGV'd it up to Paris and visited the University. Convinced that this was without a doubt the program for me I began to get all my ducks in a row to apply. In January I was finally freed from my plaster prisons and headed back to Paris for a week to study for and take the GRE. I also had the opportunity to visit and sit in on a few classes. I felt like all the pieces were falling into place. The week was filled with take-out chinese, GRE vocab, time with The Boy, and finished up with my Favorite Belgian, the BBall Lawyer, visiting and us going to see my true love and favorite author, Oscar Wilde. Those of you who have known my since the days of Mrs. Mackenzie's 12th grade English are all to aware of my complete obsession with him and The Picture of Dorian Grey. Seriously I feel like that book is the basis of EVERYTHING. All right i digress. So yeah the week was great and I became certain that my immediate future was going to involve spending two years living in Paris and finding a way to save all child soldiers in the world. That was until I took the GRE and while I literally knocked the essays out of the park I also proved for the 234th time that I cannot do elementary math and SUCK at analogies and antonyms. Its not like we all ever use those things any way. We have Google and well Google has ALL the answers to everything.
So back to Lyon I went to finish preparing my application and send it in so this school could of course accept me and my future could begin. Here is where everything got well Hiroshimad.
A bit of a back story is required here; I have had this weird health thing going on for the past few years. Weird as in doctors in both France and the United States look at my "situation" and quite literally step back, scratch their heads and say I don't know. For the past 4 years this has been happening. I have been diagnosed with everything from brain tumors to thyroid cancer to ( yes this was really said) bad energies. The consensus of most of the doctors was to sit back and continue to scratch their heads while waiting to see if anything new developed. All the while I get to walk around as a freak of nature wondering if my body will suddenly implode. In all of this my birth control was started, stopped and changed and never once did my lady visits decide to come to any kind of routine. Not that I was complaining what woman doesn't like not having to be psychotic and in pain for potentially six months at a time. Ok yeah I think I have given you enough and managed to be vague enough to move on.
So since the Boy and I are adult human beings I continued my pill and every 40 days or so would take a test just to make sure things were "fine and dandy". It even became a bit of a joke between us. I know we have a sick sense of humor. We are weird we like it move on. Well one monday morning in early February I figured I would take a test because it had been a while so I sleepily did my buisness and hopped in the shower while the test sat on the washer. Ignorantly going about my morning it was not until I was toweling off my hair when I almost broke my neck. The test did not say not pregnant. Not at all. There it was sitting there laughing at me saying pregnant. What the hell?!? I take my pill everyday, I see the Boy maybe once a month, I have plans, the doctors said this was not even possible with this situation. I repeat what the hell?!?!?!? What do I do now? I tried calling the Boy but silly me it was 730 in the morning, the only time he sees that hour is when he is still awake working on a project due at 9am. So I called the Ironwoman because well she is the only person I know who is awake at that hour. Following her directions I proceeded to take two more tests and both of them cruelly laughed at me.
I continued trying to contact the Boy and finally got ahold of him and quite clicheyey ( how would one write this) gave him the news. His first response you ask? How? I went straight to a doctor and you can better bet throughout the day I bought three more tests and had blood work done and of course all laughed at me.
Right about now many of you are probably sitting there thinking yippee or thats great or awww K8e will be a great mom. Then there are those of you who are already thinking of the many ways I am doomed for damnation and deserved to have my nose hairs plucked by Dante. All of you folks just shove off and live in your little bubbles. And i mean that in the nicest way possible. Those of you in the middle and curious to see how things turned out; yeah you Girl up there with the hair that makes me uber jealous (where in Europe do you find hair products less expensive than gold that do that to your hair) and that one other person still reading. Go fill up your cups but this time skip the cute little nespresso and move on to the booze. I am telling you, you want the hard stuff now. While I am thinking about it, it will probably be easier just to skip the cup and bring a bottle of your favorite memory wiper and head on back.
The next few days were a haze of hormones and tears. Not to mention that I could smell everything and I mean everything. Which is not so cool when you live in the Gastronomical capitol of the World. These people use EVERY part of the pig in their meals. So my new best friend and I became quickly acquainted as the vomiting began. The tears were because remember how I told alot of you to just screw off a few minutes ago? Yes I know you are still there even though you will remain anonymous and never comment, but I know your there. Well my life was suddenly full of meanness and horribleness from a certain parent (I wont tell you mine or his) stated that I should be made to get an abortion. To hearing that I was the most irresponsible person in the world to well I am just not going to repeat them because just trying to force myself to remember them makes me want to cry.
The worst by far in the entire situation was the Boy's reaction. It was very bad not good horrible. Most of my male friends actually offered to be violent for me. Which only made me laugh because they are either Gay, on the other side of the world or the most geeked out Brit you have ever known, and lets face it Brits are not so sure about the whole violence I mean come one their police don't even carry guns. Moving on. Just a few days later the Boy informed me that he needed time alone to think about things and would not give me any idea of how much time this meant but made it clear that there could be no contact at all. Now picture this I am a 28 year old single girl living in France with a "situation" that has just found out she is pregnant and her Boy wants no contact. Fear not complete emotional breakdown ensued. So much so that just a few days later I ended up in the hospital with a UTI. Yeah the hospitals and I we are great friends almost as close as the porcelain deity. But not quite. Fortunate or not the "no contact" rule lasted just 48 hours.
But then the shear rage fighting began. He said everything horrible in the book from he was too young to he thought maybe he could find someone prettier someday and other things that inspire the geeked out Brit(GOB) to google ninja assassin skills. And I threatened to leave him forever and never let him know this baby or me or how long my hair might get or my dietary habits. Yeah folks that hormone business is no joke. I do have to pause here to thank The Other Dad (even though she was a girl)TOD, Ironwoman, The Aussie, and St. Mambo because they exuded such support that I do not know how I would have otherwise made it through that period. There were other people who were very kind and it is OK to hate me if I forgot to mention you here. I still love you but come on I have a lot to get out here and my hands are still shaking.
Somehow through fits of rage and hatred I realized the biggest problem in this whole situation. What is it you ask? I am happy to tell you. I was still desperately and hopelessly in love with the Boy. And he was with me. But suddenly the world was all about the fact that I was not Jewish (yet). Seriously world it cannot be my fault that the entire Jewish population of France HATES me and does not want to help me or wants permission from the Consistoire. And folks they simply do not ever give permission to convert. They wouldn't before and what on earth is to make me think that they would now that I am baking a "half-jew" illegitimate child?
There was much irrationality that ensued and for the sake of the fact that you are probably either having trouble seeing the screen clearly because you are drinking wine like water or your tequila bottle is hurting your teeth because you keep missing the gaping hole in your mouth.
So I did manage at the end of March to find a family who was running a Rich Jewish event for Passover (see previous entry) and set off to work. I have to tell you people that was 5 of the best days of my life. I met a wonderful little girl from the states who taught me everything I now know about Passover and for the first time I began to really think that things were possible. I was going to find people to help me convert. Even the other girls I was working with were terribly supportive. This was until the Friday morning of Passover. Otherwise known as the Anniversary of my Fathers Death. Yeah a bad day. Well guess who ended up in the hospital? No it was not that sweet little girl. It was me I was 12 weeks pregnant and managed to come down with viral meningitis FOR THE FOURTH TIME IN MY LIFE. I am telling you people I am a medical marvel!!! I should also mention that the only people who knew I was pregnant were the girls I was sharing a hotel room. I had to tell them because well if I was not peeing I was puking.
And of course on the day I finally get out of the hospital what does France do? They have a rail strike. So I had to manage to get from some city in some area in France to Lyon and home. The highlight of that trip was the Cambodian taxi driver I had in Lyon whose parents live in Houston. The funniest thing about it all was that we spoke french while talking about Texas....a bit odd...but then again normal in my life.
Highlight of that was that the Boy arrived just two days after me in Lyon and we spent almost two glorious weeks together. Where we fought like hell and loved like hell. And through it all I realized that he was potentially more attached to this pregnancy than I was. I caught him on more than one occasion kissing patting and doing other super cheesy weird things to my belly. But what gave it away was the way he looked at my freakishly growing belly. At first I thought it was because he just could not wrap his head around how quickly it is exploding but his eyes were not really filled with fear. It was something else. Something there really isn't a word for him. And you should have seen the pride on his face when he was the only one who could find the heartbeat with the little at home Doppler thingie. I still cant find anything other than my own heartbeat. :(
The "worst" part of his visit was that I met LaMOM. I could regale you with an entire book about this three hour encounter right here but in interest of respect and kindness and the fact that you are already completely intoxicated right now I will spare you. For now. Just know that I survived and have a whole new perspective on the Boy!
So this weeks plan (and its been generally the same for a few weeks so might happen) is to get me all packed up here in Lyon and move me to Paris the end of June. Where we will be moving into a 30Square meter (300ish square foot) STUDIO apartment. I maintain that this is until we find something a little more realistic for a couple with a baby. We will also have to get Pacsed in August or September so you know I can legally stay in this country and such. And hopefully somehow things will work out and people will realize that a baby is a miracle and a good thing.
So yeah I left out lots of information about the "situation" and the potential outcome, as well as both general family reactions but I am tired and you are about to go pray to my deity. So I suppose I shall leave you for now. Perhaps I will continue more information on this but I really want to start planning on all of the exciting things and how things will be good.
So I shall leave yo for now with my new hearing aids (oh yeah another souvenir of the last few months) and craving french fries (because thats what is growing in me rather than a baby) and remind you all to drink a large glass of water and take a tylenol now. You will thank me in the morning.
Be Well,
K8e
